With the release of id Software's Rage this morning, AMD has pushed out a new preview driver specifically for the game. Unlike last week's 11.10 preview driver, AMD has not assigned a version number to this driver as it's based on an earlier fork than 11.10, making it both newer and older than the 11.10 preview. As a result AMD is reccomending users only install this driver for playing Rage, and stick to 11.10 otherwise.

Update: AMD apparently posted the wrong driver the first time around. The Catalyst preview for Rage has been re-released with the correct driver

lame on AMDs part. This driver nullifies the 11.10 BF3 driver they released. Completely amateurish stuff they're doing. Its not like these are obscure games with an obscure release dates. They're not in touch with these developers to produce decent drivers before the game is released?? Rage looks like a complete mess on AMD cards. Reply

You don't seem to understand how much of a chicken and egg issue this is. Driver makers aim for proper support for a given API, and in many cases they make mistakes. Then you have the game/application maker who does things that are unusual, and cause problems with the API itself. Even with PERFECT drivers, these games may very well break(showing where the game maker screwed up in conforming to the API in question). The driver makers then have two options, fix it so their drivers actually misbehave in terms of the API just to make it so the game works the way the game designer intended, or they can stick to their guns and point out to the game developer where their game violates the rules of the API which are causing the problems.

We can assume that it is somewhere between these extremes, where the AMD drivers are of decent quality but not perfect, but at the same time, you have Rage doing some funky stuff that causes problems.

Remember, DirectX has a LOT of different function calls, many that almost never have been used. You also have similar function calls where over time, a bunch have gotten most of the attention, and it is only on rare occasions that developers use some of the others. This makes it very difficult to check, because Microsoft has never pushed out a proper driver check application that would allow driver makers to verify that their drivers are working properly. Microsoft SHOULD have a full test suite that does a test of EVERY DirectX function call to make sure the drivers are responding to them properly. That is easier said than done, but if you make an API, you can test each call in software, then use the hardware and make sure the results are the same. Since performance is less of a concern at that level and getting proper results is, that would work.

You also have problems where NVIDIA introduces special features that are not a part of the DirectX API, so you end up with forking code in games that support the NVIDIA code, and then you have to test for how things work with those features turned off. NVIDIA could have the driver problems that developers are coding around, and as a result of fixing for NVIDIA, the code gets broken on AMD cards. At that point, it is a problem with the game developer not properly testing on both major GPU makers products.

Developing with NVIDIA or AMD alone in mind, and pushing out a product without properly testing for BOTH companies products dealing with it properly is a big problem. Don't assume who is at fault, because we just can't know. It is possible that when Rage was being developed, the newest Radeon card they were testing on was a Radeon 4890 for all we know, and things broke on the DX 11 hardware.Reply